Croon if you want, Damian Lewis. Everyone deserves a midlife wobble

We all did things during the Covid-19 pandemic that make us look back and cringe. I should say, before I embark on mocking anyone else, that I myself took to reciting John Donne sonnets and posting the footage on social media. Rishi Sunak forced through Eat Out to Help Out, which might be even worse. Damian Lewis, star of Homeland and Billions, is reported to have “rediscovered his love of the guitar” during lockdown, which is considerably more sane and, according to a quick rustle on ChatGPT, places him on a par with roughly 100,000 middle-aged dads across the UK.

Sometimes, however, what happened in lockdown should stay in lockdown. Lewis’s pandemic passion project has only got more public. We had a warning in July 2023, when he was booked to open the British Grand Prix at Silverstone with a crooning, sex-drenched rendition of God Save the King. (No guitar, but Lewis was accompanied by the saxophonist from his new band, Mission Creep. Because when I’m asked to sing an anthem of fealty to Charles Mountbatten-Windsor, I reach for the instrument that gave us Careless Whisper.) Since then, things have escalated. I regret to inform you that Damian Lewis has released a music video.

It’s the white loafers that do it for me. In the video for his new single, King, Lewis paces the graffiti-strewn stairwell of what seems to be a brutalist council estate. You can almost smell the urine. (The point – not subtle – is to heighten the irony of lyrics about his dream of kingship in a land of “pillars and columns, a thousand golden halls”.) Amid the grime and the grit, Lewis sports a pair of luminously white luxury boat shoes. They remain pristine. Gucci will sell you a suspiciously similar pair for £880, via Selfridges. Given that Lewis has been photographed in the same shoes walking the dog, these appear to come from his own wardrobe.

There’s enough other material in the King video – and in Sweet Chaos, the recently released title track of his second album – to mock for days. Social media, with its characteristic kindness, has been doing just that. But although my profession puts me firmly in the business of snide commentary about celebrities, this one feels a bit too easy. Isn’t everyone allowed a midlife crisis? Not least Lewis, whose wife, Helen McCrory, died of cancer in 2021. Her absence is felt in every moment of She Comes, the ode to grief at the heart of his previous album.

Lewis joins a long list of celebrities who have tried to recast themselves in midlife. His reinvention can no doubt can be linked to Alison Mosshart, frontwoman of the Kills, whom he started dating a little over a year after McCrory died. The pivot to singer-songwriter is particularly well-trodden: the comedians Mitchell and Webb parodied it in 2010 with a sketch about “Neil”, whose PR refuses to allow questions about his career before music. (“Whatever he did previously, Neil is now a singer-songwriter.”) He turns out to be Neil Armstrong.

Tom Hanks, America’s favourite centrist dad, published a novel in 2023. (“He must have had a good deal of time on his hands in lockdown,” wrote Tim Adams of this parish in his review. “Clunky,” said the Sunday Times.) Russell Crowe, Hugh Laurie and Kiefer Sutherland have also taken the route to singer-songwriter; Nicole Kidman, in a more offbeat move, announced this month that she has trained as a death doula. These are all high-achieving, wealthy people, entirely prepared to embarrass themselves (and in Crowe’s case it was a dead cert.) Few people on the planet have the luxury of choice. What they reveal, therefore, is that we’d all write that novel, strum that guitar, even wrestle with life and death, if only we had the freedom to try.

I wouldn’t say Lewis should give up the day job. But we wouldn’t be taking note of his shortcomings as a musical performer if he hadn’t already proved himself as a very, very good actor. More than 20 years later, I still can’t shake his performance as the emotionally constipated Soames Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga. He was not, on that occasion, secretly wearing a woman’s thong to shape his character’s walk; that was for the 2008 film The Escapist, as he later revealed to a New Yorker festival. Again, there were warnings that the man is pretty intense.

It would be a genuine loss if Lewis’s thirst to make more music videos took him away from quality drama. Fortunately, audience demand seems limited. We mortals should feel reassured. Thank you, Damian, for reminding us that no one succeeds at everything.

Photograph by Damien Lewis/YouTube